Unlike machine translation systems, electronic dictionaries are used to look up individual words and word combinations while reading printed texts or texts displayed on a computer screen. Users may interact with electronic dictionaries in different ways.
Also, there are a plethora of electronic devices with display screens capable of displaying text. These devices are suitable for using electronic dictionaries which may be installed locally, i.e. on the user's computer or portable device (such as smartphones, PDAs, cell phones, digital photo or video cameras, e-book readers, and other gadgets), on a local area network, or they may be available over the Internet.
Many of the aforesaid devices have advanced displays and associated logic capable of supporting non-keyboard type input methods. For example, the devices may support pen-based input, or touch-based input.